Description
Description
In this absurd and wildly inventive debut collection, Emily Greenberg imagines the inner lives of the politicians, celebrities, artists, and entertainers who have ushered in our post-truth era.
With equal parts compassion and incisiveness, Greenberg vividly renders the porous boundaries between fact and fiction, public and private, reality and simulation. George W. Bush almost tells Jay Leno the truth about his paintings. Kellyanne Conway lands a punch. Hawaii's governor enjoys a transcendent experience with a sentient Twitter bird amid a disastrous false missile alert. And in the final story, Paris Hilton falls from a helicopter onto Thomas Pynchon's fire escape, leading to a surreal adventure full of magical dentists, talking dogs, and unexpected friendships.
Satirical and deadly serious, clever and tender, Alternative Facts forges new spaces for meaning and connection across our fractured realities.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
"These fictionalizations investigate their real-world counterparts with a surprising amount of humanity and complexity, and the prose reveals the author's attention to craft . . . A bold and often eerie set of tales that skillfully explore life's what-if complexities."
-Kirkus Reviews
"These are stories that will stay with you. Maybe because of how absurd, yet somehow believable they are. Maybe because of their unconventional formats, or because of the intensity of diving so deeply and so compassionately into the intimate and personal inner worlds of these flawed and complex characters."
-Independent Book Review
"The pleasures of reading Greenberg's stories are multitudinous and mind-boggling. There is wonder and exhilaration and hilarity, surprise-astonishment-at every turn, and such beautiful, persuasive strangeness throughout that one feels the world has gone atilt. These stories are disturbing, wildly thrilling, sometimes scary, fun. (Perhaps this is how it feels to ride a mechanical bull-if the bull had heart and was also very, very smart?) Alternative Facts offers a glorious simulacrum of life. All great fiction does this, of course-but Emily Greenberg has done double (triple, quadruple, octuple) duty by building her narratives upon what we think we already know. So buckle in and get ready to be thrown."
-Michelle Herman, author of Close-Up and Dog
"Smart, funny, insightful. These stories make me want to find the mind that made them, burrow inside, and feast for days on a world that's strangely familiar but just skewed enough to show me where I come from. And possibly where I belong. A poised and exciting debut."
-John Haskell, author of The Complete Ballet and American Purgatorio
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Publishing Information
Publishing Information
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